"The greatest fantasy of our century"
Communism had attracted a number of intellectuals in the 20th century as it offered a better society – a society of the free and equals – " … free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" as the Communist Manifesto put it in 1848. It even offered a vision – withering away of the state.
However, many sensitive intellectuals were soon disillusioned during the Soviet Rule in Russia. Collectivization of agriculture could be enforced only after a large number of farmers were killed. Dissenters were made to 'confess' errors and later imprisoned and 'liquidated'. Leon Trotsky, a prominent dissenter, a votary of 'permanent revolution', was hounded out of Soviet Union and was killed in Mexico.
The earliest Indian intellectual who expressed his distaste for the totalitarian regime which suppressed all dissent and freedom of speech was, Minoo Masani, who founded the Swatantra Party along with C.Rajagopalachari and N.G.Ranga to oppose the socialist pattern of society adopted by the Congress Party in its Avadi session in 1955. Masani had written his famous essay, 'Socialism Re-considered' in the 1930s. With his characteristic clarity, he used to say that he opposed not the aims of socialism but the methodology of socialism – concentration of all power in the hands of the state, which means the ruling party or the ruling faction. The Congress adopted socialist pattern of society and the results are there for all to see – average 3.5% GDP growth from 1950 to 1990, permit-license raj till Prime Minister P.V.Narasimha Rao ushered in liberalization of Indian economy in 1991 through Dr.Man Mohan Singh, his Finance Minister, who was an academic and later a bureaucrat of the Indian state or the UNO.
After the second world war, many books were written by the ardent supporters of Communism repudiating their faith. One of book was, 'God that Failed', a compilation of six essays by writers and journalists of repute – Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, Andre Gide, Louis Fisher and Stephen Spender. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel on the repressive totalitarian regime made famous phrases such as "Big Brother", " double- think", and "newspeak". His satire, Animal Farm, is a scathing indictment of freedom and equality in a totalitarian regime – "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than the others". Another book which exposed the Communist rule was by an insider and it was called 'The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System' by Milovan Djilas, who was the Vice President of the Federal People's Republic of Yogoslavakia, where he describes in detail how the Communist Party has become a new class with all privileges and perks of a ruling class.
I was reminded of the above books when I read the obituary of another disillusioned Marxist, Leszek Kolakowski, who passed away on July 17th 2009 in the Economist (August 1-7) and Financial Times (23/7). He was a Polish-born philosopher, who fled Poland in 1968 after an anti-Semitic campaign by the Communist Party, with his wife, Tamara, a Jew. Born at Radom, near Warsaw in 1927, but his schooling was interrupted after the German invasion of Poland. After the war, he studied philosophy at the University of Lodz and finished doctorate at the Warsaw University in 1953. He spoke out for greater democracy but his books were banned. Later, he was a professor at McGill University in Montreal and then Berkeley University in California, and finally, he became a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
His magnum opus was the three-volume study, "Main Currents of Marxism : Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution" where he has demolished the pillars of Marxist thought – the theory of value, the idea of class struggle and the historical materialism. He described Marxism as "the greatest fantasy of our century", and that the "monstrous tyranny of Stalinism was not an aberration, but the logical consequence of Karl Marx's call for a vanguard of intellectuals to take charge of revolutionary change". " The only medicine communism has invented," he observed, " the centralized, beyond social control, state ownership of the national wealth and one-party rule, is worse than the illness it is supposed to cure; it is less efficient economically and it makes the bureaucratic character of social relations an absolute principle." He dismissed the idea of "democratic socialism" as " contradictory as a fried snowball".
His distaste for communism did not make him an evangelist for free-market economy. He was too inquisitive, skeptical and irreverent to support any particular doctrine strongly. He was critical of those who relied on science for answers to the big questions about life. He criticized the emptiness of secular materialism. He was convinced that religion, in some form or the other, was a necessary part of human existence.
"One of the crucial European traditions is the ability …to look at one's own civilization with eyes of others," he said in an interview in 2005. "We should be able to look at ourselves self-critically. If we are unable to do that, our civilization will destroy itself".
One of his best known aphorisms is: "We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are."
While Financial Times hailed him as the " Latter-day Erasmus inspired overthrow of communism", The Economist said, : " Having spent his youthful years as an ardent communist and atheist, Leszek Kolakowski, one of the great minds of modern era, turned into Marxism's most perceptive opponent, and one with a profound respect for religion".
August 22,2009.
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